Shock

For a long moment, I remembered, as clearly as if I were standing there, my father, in the midst of a long raging rant, asking, accusing me "Do you think I want to rape you?" I am not sure if I nodded or stayed silent, because he'd articulated my precise fear. But he then shouted, "If I was going to rape anyone she'd be prettier than you." My mother came in shortly after, and he told her "She thinks I want to rape her!" And my mother turned on me, "How could you think that?" I knew then how utterly alone I was, how completely I had to defend myself from then on. I was 13. I would never have thought, or used the word, "rape." Not at that age, it was so far out of my experience, unimaginable. I didn't make that up, it came from him. It still seems like the deepest, darkest place in my life.

This is not normal.

I tried to find this story here, but it didn't show up. Only hints and other stories. It seems odd that I had not written about it before. Maybe it's just not showing up on my searches. I could have sworn I'd written about it ad nauseum.

To think, he thought he was treating me "like a princess." Maybe an abused goddess' princess... . Well, you know how those old gods loved their incest.

Any wonder I couldn't grieve him? Only react with a kind of weird shock at his long awaited death? And my ambivalence toward my ineffectual mother? It all just gets too fucking weird, even after decades.